Buying In - (Page viii) viii rob walker Facebook, and so on. The landscape seemed to be changing every day. By early 2004, I was writing about all of this on a weekly basis, in a column for The New York Times Magazine, called “Consumed.” As with my earlier commercial critiques for Slate, my perspective still tilted toward consumers, but I was paying a lot more attention to the commercial persuasion side of the dialogue, as well as to the marketing experts and consumer-culture observers and what they had to say about what was changing. According to many of them, this new landscape not only had changed the commercial persuasion business, it had changed us. We consumers had become fundamentally different from prior generations. Pliable citizens of the old “passive couchpotato” nation had taken in advertising like an order: After repeated exposure to a particular thirty-second TV commercial, the consumer of the past would compliantly “go out like an android and buy Downy” or whatever, as one new-technology guru put it. But right around the turn of the twenty-first century, this line of thinking went, a “new consumer” had started to appear. By the time I started writing “Consumed,” this clever new creature had been armed with all kinds of dazzling technology, from adblocking gizmos to alternative, grassroots media. This added up to what professional zeitgeist watchers like to call “a paradigm shift.” “Consumers don’t march in lockstep anymore,” one celebrated trend master declared. “We are immune to advertising,” other experts announced. The mindless “mass market” had been shouldered aside by thinking individuals: “Consumers are fleeing the mainstream.” Somehow we had all become more or less impervious to marketing and brands and logos; we could see
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